Commitment to Excellence

I was in South Florida last month, as it happens, and you really can’t spend any significant time in South Florida without getting on a boat. Took a glass-bottomed boat out of Key Largo, headed for Molasses Reef, just a few miles off shore. Once there, I and my fellow passengers gathered around the glass-bottomed part of the boat, there to look at coral whipping in the currents, angry barracudas, peaceful tropical fish.

Which would all have been well and good, except that we were, after all, on a boat, and boats tend to go up and down and up and down and up and down in the waves, and when you’re trying to focus on the beauty of a living coral reef, and when you just had lunch, well, you know, you have a tendency not to feel so good all the time. In fact, you might get a little queasy, and if you’re careful, you might get completely seasick.

So when I tell you that one of the best things about Finding Nemo is that it won’t make you sick, you’ll understand.

Maybe that sounds like condemning the movie with faint praise (although I think all the other seasick people on the boat might disagree). But that is just the first step in praising Finding Nemo, just the most obvious and superficial grace note. The images of the undersea world are crisp, sharp, and stunning; far better than anyone who doesn’t own a wetsuit will ever see. The opening scenes, showing life on an Australian coral reef, are a symphony of color, with smoky, hazy ocean blues in the foreground and showy, wavy corals in the background, with brightly-colored fish everywhere. As the story evolves, we get to see even more of the ocean; the murky reaches of the continental shelf, the haunted darkness of the abyss, the deadly beauty of a jellyfish colony, the serene quickness of the deep ocean currents. When the movie finally comes up for air in Sydney Harbor, the city skyline looks weird, almost unreal in comparison to the wonders below.

And then there are the other strengths of Finding Nemo, the kind of strengths so characteristic of Pixar movies in general. The story follows the standard Pixar formula (plucky, mismatched outcasts on an impossible mission), but it’s a joy, anyway, with Marlin the clownfish seeking his son Nemo, captured by a skin-diving dentist and transported to a tropical aquarium. The celebrity voices are lower-tier, but enormously effective (Albert Brooks as the nebbishy clownfish, Ellen DeGeneres as his ditzy sidekick, Willem Dafoe as a scarred veteran of aquarium escapistry, Geoffrey Rush as a thoughtful pelican). And there’s considerable humor everywhere, from the high-concept (sharks at an undersea version of an AA meeting) to the low (DeGeneres reviving the old Gracie Allen schtick for a new generation).

In fact, it might be easy to overlook Finding Nemo, to fold it in with the other Pixar hits, to lump it in with overlooked classics like A Bug’s Life. Unlike every other studio in the history of Hollywood, Pixar has never turned in a bad performance, never created any movie that was less than superb, never phoned it in, never cashed in. It just hasn’t happened, and I don’t think we realize how incredible that is. Pixar has a commitment to excellence that just isn’t part of the Hollywood ethos anymore, and it shines through in every frame, every pixel of Finding Nemo.

Not much more needs to be said than that, but two points here. First, the subtext in Finding Nemo is fascinating because it touches so much on the disability experience. Marlin (Brooks) suffers a horrifying loss early on in the movie; he becomes risk-averse to the point where you could argue he’s got post-traumatic stress syndrome. His son Nemo has one fin smaller than the other, which makes Marlin all the more overprotective, as most parents of kids with disabilities tend to be. Dory (DeGeneres) has severe short-term memory loss, and Marlin gets frustrated with her, the way that people tend to get frustrated dealing with cognitive impairments. The disability portrayals are fairly true-to-life, but unlike the usual practice, the focus is on the abilities of the characters. Marlin is able to rise to the occasion when bravery demands it, Nemo is able to swim to freedom despite his physical impairment, and Dory is able to remember and use key information despite her limitations. It’s probably not the deepest interpretation of disability, but at least the portrayals are positive, for once.

There’s that, and then there’s the security subtext, hammered home by Marlin’s constant (but, as we see, justified) concern for his son’s security. Yet, when he finds out the situation, with Nemo “safe” in an aquarium, with no other fish there to harm him, he still does all he can to rescue his son, to bring him back to the big scary predator-filled ocean. If Finding Nemo is a parable for the Age of Anxiety, it’s a positive one, and reminds us that we are to “just keep swimming” despite our fears.

There is probably a lot more to be said about Finding Nemo, a lot more opportunities to analyze and parse its excellence. Certainly it doesn’t say nearly enough that the movie doesn’t make you seasick. But, then, if you’ve been seasick recently, you’ll understand that that, too, is high praise for a movie that deserves all the praise it can garner.

No Soup for You

The scene I liked in Meet The Parents was an early scene at the dinner table. A young couple in love, played by Ben Stiller and Teri Polo, break bread with her parents, Blythe Danner and Robert DeNiro. Danner is smiling sweetly and serving undercooked pot roast, Polo is looking quietly radiant, Stiller is fidgeting nervously, and DeNiro manages to be cheerful, yet menacing.

Somehow, DeNiro has the idea that Stiller grew up on a farm. Stiller, who obviously wouldn’t know a tractor from his elbow, has to dissuade DeNiro of this belief. He didn’t grow up on a farm, he says, but it was farm country, and a lot of the other kids lived on farms, and some of them had ponies. “I hated those kids,” Stiller blathers. “In fact, I hate anyone that ever had a pony while they were growing up.”

It is at this moment that Blythe Danner’s blithe exterior cracks. “I had a pony. When I was a little girl, we all had ponies. He was a beautiful pony, and I loved him.” She begins sobbing, and runs out of the room. Polo leaves the table to comfort her mother, shooting Stiller a nasty look. DeNiro glowers at Stiller, points his finger accusingly, and says…

Well, you’ll have to use your imagination, because I made that scene up. Stole it, really, from an old Seinfeld episode. I don’t feel the least bit bad about it, either, because so much of Meet The Parents seems to be a direct rip-off of Seinfeld. Meet The Parents has airplane humor, yes, and broad physical comedy, and relationship humor, and wacky parents. (Stiller’s father, of course, was a Seinfeld regular as Jason Alexander’s father.) The plot is as thin as any sitcom episode; Stiller meets Polo’s parents, with the intention of asking her father for permission to get married, and wackiness ensues. Sort of.

Meet The Parents is a moderatly funny light comedy of errors that tries very hard to please. If that’s all you’re looking for in a movie, look no further. Anyone who’s expecting anything else should look elsewhere. Meet The Parents is only worth seeing if you’re easily entertained, or if you’re the kind of person who just loves to pick movies apart for your own cruel purposes.

The first problem with Meet The Parents is a common Hollywood problem, one that’s almost not worth talking about anymore. If you’ve seen the trailer for the movie, you’ve seen almost all of the funny parts. Meet The Parents, like Seinfeld, is designed to be “painfully funny”; if you know all the funny parts, all that’s left is painful.

The second problem is with the characterization. The focus of Meet The Parents is properly on Stiller and DeNiro, and both turn out performances that are decent if uninspired. Stiller stutters and stammers and looks uncomfortable and nervous. DeNiro is relaxed, but intimidating; he’s the rough equivalent of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi. However, there’s no attempt to have any of these characters do anything that’s not in their respective personas. Meet The Parents doesn’t challenge either Stiller or DeNiro to do anything we haven’t already seen. Worse, all of the other characters are flat and two-dimensional; they serve more as scenery than participants. (This is most painfully obvious in the case of the gifted comic actor Owen Wilson, who literally fades into the woodwork.)

Thirdly, the script isn’t very imaginitive with its comedy. The laughs in Meet The Parents derive from one of two sources; DeNiro’s confrontations with Stiller, and Stiller’s alarming tendency to break or injure props. Stiller and DeNiro handle what’s given to them deftly, but there’s no sense of comic imagination, no unpredictability, no real surprises.

Meet The Parents manages to be just about as funny as your average Seinfeld episode. That sounds like a compliment; it isn’t. Seinfeld reruns are a third as long and you’re not charged $4.75 for the matinee. However, it is the funniest movie in months. This says much more about the state of American comic moviemaking than you really want to know.

An Echo, Not A Choice

The foundations of Las Vegas are not made of sand; they are a truth and a lie. The truth is that Vegas is a fun place to be, which is absolutely correct in every way. Las Vegas is the Capital of Fun. Gambling is fun. Watching sports on the big screen with a bet or two on the side is fun. Travel is fun, whether you’re going to Venice or New York or Paris, and Vegas has replicas of all of them. Free drinks are fun, so are massive buffet joints if you like such things. Swimming pools and concerts and golf and blackjack and pirate ships and white tigers are all fun, and Las Vegas is the place to go to enjoy all of them.

That’s the truth. The lie is that you can go to Vegas and gamble and win, that you can beat the house, that you can get the edge you need to finance all that fun. The lie is that your golden dreams of million-dollar slot payoffs or thirty-to-one NFL longshots or monster poker hands will come true. It’s an immensely profitable lie, and one that provides and finances so much of the fun you can have in Vegas. (Not to say that it’s not possible to win - I pretty much broke even in Vegas last time I was there, with wins on college basketball outpacing losses at blackjack and slots - but in the long run, you’ll lose more than you win.)

Ocean’s Eleven buys into both the lie and the truth about Vegas. It is first and foremost a fun, frothy movie, utterly devoid of any intention or ambition other than entertainment, existing only to amuse the audience. It’s also the ultimate beat-the-house fantasy, with George Clooney leading a band of merry men into the vault of the Bellagio to steal umpty-billion dollars from Andy Garcia’s casino mogul.

As someone who’s favorite Vegas betting locale is the dollar blackjack table over at Casino Royale, I’m the first to tell you that you don’t win big in Vegas unless you bet big and take risks. The best part of Ocean’s Eleven is the sheer audacity of the thing. The plan for robbing the casino is a thing of beauty, as complex as a Tom Clancy novel although not quite as long. I won’t share all the details, but it involves an amazing series of misdirections and twists, and director Steven Soderburgh doesn’t give any of them away until the appropriate time. In terms of cleverness, Ocean’s Eleven has the other two cool heist pictures of the year - Frank Oz’s The Score and David Mamet’s Heist beat handily.

However, both of the aforementioned movies featured acting performances (from Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman, respectively) that outshined their movies. Ocean’s Eleven is the exact opposite. Despite the celebrated all-star cast of Ocean’s Eleven, the actors turn in dumb, lifeless performances that don’t measure up to either Soderburg’s direction or the excellence of the script.

George Clooney is the mastermind of the heist, and he’s just dismal. His performance is characteristic of the rest of the acting in two respects. First, it’s phoned-in, there’s no sense that any effort went into anything he says or does. Second, it’s terribly derivative. Clooney’s character here, Danny Ocean, is nothing more than a pale echo of every other character he’s played. Clooney may not have enough range to play a lot of different characters, but Danny Ocean isn’t one bit different from, say, Jack Foley in the underrated Out of Sight.

(I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but Ocean’s Eleven would have been consummately better if it had been envisioned as a sequel to Out of Sight, which also featured Soderburg directing George Clooney’s bank robber character. Out of Sight ended with George Clooney being sent to prison, and Ocean’s Eleven coincidentally begins with George Clooney being let out of prison. What would be so hard, then, about stitching the two movies together? All you would have to do, first, would be to add Samuel L. Jackson to the cast, and you can’t tell me there’s a movie in the world that wouldn’t be improved by adding Samuel L. Jackson. You could put Jennifer Lopez in the Miss Julia Roberts role, which would mean that she could do some sort of weepy tearjerker chick movie that I wouldn’t have to watch, and wouldn’t watch, unless you threatened me with sulfuric acid torture or a Hillary Clinton C-SPAN speech or having to watch Along Came A Spider again. It would be a sexier movie, anyway, because Julia Roberts in this movie is about as sexy as Marlon Brando cutting his toenails, or Teddy Kennedy waking up with a hangover. If you doubt me, take another look at that dress Lopez didn’t wear to the Oscars. Who was the designer on that one, Saran Wrap? There hasn’t been anything that revealing since the Pentagon Papers. Of course, you’d also have to get Michael Keaton to play that sad-sack FBI agent, too, although to judge from his career he’s probably in the Witness Protection Program now. There’s someone whose stock is lower than Enron, huh? He couldn’t get work as a beer vendor in Cleveland. Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.)

Clooney isn’t the worst offender. Matt Damon, too, is little more than an echo; plays his small role as a less interesting variant of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Brad Pitt is his usual bland self, although somehow he borrows elements from both Damon’s performance in the underrated Rounders and Clooney’s tattoo job in From Dusk Till Dawn. Andy Garcia as the hapless casino boss is just a cut-rate version of Fredo Corleone. And Miss Julia Roberts is almost narcoleptic as Clooney’s ex-wife. Interestingly, Ocean’s Eleven asks us to believe that she is an art curator; all she is really required to do in this position is look soulfully in the direction of the Bellagio’s art collection.

It’s the actors with the smallest roles that make the biggest impression. Veterans Elliott Gould and Carl Reiner steal the show right from under the noses of the younger stars. Gould plays a rival casino owner who finances the job, and is maybe the funniest sight gag in the movie. Reiner shows the most range, mixing humor and dignity in a memorable performance. Bernie Mac rounds out the comic side of things as a crooked blackjack dealer; he gets very little screen time but still has the funniest line in the movie.

The real problem, though, with Ocean’s Eleven is a simple one. Clooney, Damon, Pitt and Roberts are in Las Vegas having fun and I am not, and when the actors are having more fun than the audience, something’s seriously wrong. Ocean’s Eleven is fun but not as much fun as a three-day weekend at Treasure Island with free chips and casino comps. However, there aren’t any mean-spirited blackjack dealers to take the fun out of losing your bankroll. Sometimes you just have to play the percentages and take what you can get.

No Cure for Hangovers

A few years back, I was in a bar, with a friend, and my friend was meeting one of his friends, who just happened to be a writer. Not only that, but a writer whose work I had read, and who I respected a lot. We hung out for a few hours, talking about the shape of the world, and I got to rebut the big idea that he had at the time, although I don’t know if I did so effectively. Anyway, I wasn’t drinking at the time, and I had a car, and I got to drive everybody home, and I learned something. I learned that it’s one thing to get to hang out at a bar with a writer whose work you like and respect, and another thing altogether to have that same writer almost throw up in the back seat of your car.

This is Ocean’s 12.

Ocean’s 11 was like the first part of the evening; it was a lot of fun, smart and stylish, even though its actors were just skating through on the strength of their past performances. Nobody was at the top of their form, just as you or I wouldn’t be at the top of our form after we’d had one or two, but it was a good night out just the same, and if we had left it there, everything would have been just fine.

I said at the time that Ocean’s 11 was the cinematic equivalent of a three-day weekend in Vegas. Ocean’s 12 is the payback, what you can expect from a weekend of drunken debauchery. The movie stumbles around blearily, tripping over itself, going on wild, improvisational jags about nothing, and then finally throwing up on the upholstery and falling, stiff and cold, on the rug. You’ll walk out of Ocean’s 12 needing three aspirin and a plate of Waffle House hashbrowns with Tabasco sauce, or whatever your favorite hangover cure might be.

Towards the close of Ocean’s 11, casino boss Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) warns the Ocean crew: “Run and hide. Run and hide.” Nobody listens to them, much. Despite having a tip or two, Benedict finds all of the thieves relatively easily, hiding in plain sight. George Clooney’s Danny Ocean, newly remarried to Julia Roberts, is hiding out in suburban Connecticut. Damon practically jumps in the back of Benedict’s limo. The techno-guy is doing pathetic stand-up in a comedy club somewhere, and Bernie Mac is getting his fingernails done. Only the capture of Brad Pitt’s Rusty Ryan character — who is seen telling a strung-out Topher Grace not to “go all Frankie Muniz on me” is done with any kind of style or wit.

This sets the scene for what story Ocean’s 12 has. Benedict wants the money back that was stolen from him in the first movie, with interest. (Garcia, unfortunately, is a Fredo Corleone type in a Michael Corleone part.) And then Benedict lets them go, and the Ocean’s 11 team decides to oblige him by going to Europe and stealing valuables to make up the difference between what they still have and what they owe. (Only Elliot Gould — lost behind a pair of thick eyeglasses — has actually made a profit with his share of the money.)

So we have the first divergence from Ocean’s 11; instead of one big heist, you have multiple smaller heists. Second, instead of Vegas, you have the setting as Amsterdam. Third, the team splits up; Carl Reiner pulls out early, and Bernie Mac gets caught and has to spend the whole movie in a depressing Dutch jail. (The only thing Ocean’s 12 does right is keeping Julia Roberts off-screen until she’s needed.)

Worse, the heists don’t make any sense. The team — there’s some discussion on what the team name should be, actually — has to steal a stock certificate from the home of an agorophobic financier. The first step in this process is to raise the house by several inches, so the criminally underused Don Cheadle can make a crossbow shot from a rooftop across the street. This is done in order to alert the beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones that the team is in Amsterdam. Nobody, apparently, thinks to take a chunk out of the parapet that Cheadle braces his crossbow on; that would make too much sense, even though it would be infinitely easier.

There are at least a dozen similar plot holes in Ocean’s 12 – all of which are the more noticable because Ocean’s 11 didn’t have any to speak of. And the acting is, if anything, worse — not only are Clooney and Damon and Pitt coasting off prior characters, they’re coasting off their previous characters in Ocean’s 11.

But that’s not so much the problem. The “let’s have fun and steal a lot of money” vibe from the first movie has been replaced by “let’s steal this money so we don’t get killed” vibe, which isn’t anywhere near as enjoyable. There’s no verve in Ocean’s 12, no bounce, no attitude. It just sits up there, like a big blob of goo, dripping slime and mucus as it plods along. The pacing is also ruined by the frequent reminders of the impending deadline — which serve no purpose other than to let director Steven Soderburgh try out different font styles for the titles.

Are there flashes of brilliance in Ocean’s 12? Yes, there are, and even if these are few and far between, they’re there and are much appreciated. But the end result is the same as a night at the bar with the famous drunken writer of your choice. Except that Ocean’s 12 goes out of its way to spill beer on your shoes, throw up in the back of your sedan, and stiff you with the tab, all at once. It is a horrible movie in every way, unworthy of the franchise and your time and energy.

An American Tragedy

There remains, then, the character between these extremes,–that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,–a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.
– Aristotle, Poetics

Dear Teacher: I cheated, and I am not a bit sorry. I stole this report from a movie review website and I would do it again. Nyah nyah nyah.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a tragedy, but it is an American tragedy, which means that the rules are a little bit different. America is the land of Huey Long (and just imagine Aristotle and Huey Long sitting down eating some gumbo, if you like), who promised “every man a king”, and if it’s not true in actuality it can be true in tragedy. Maybe every man can’t be a Sun King, but in America you can always be your own Oedipus or Thyestes.

(OK, I had to look up Thyestes, too; a grisly tale, but tell me you haven’t seen worse on Jerry Springer.)

George Milton and Lennie Small aren’t highly renowned or prosperous. They’re migrant farm workers, tramping around from ranch to ranch for $50 a month and room and board. Still, they’re living their lives as Americans, which means they’re not working just for money but for a shared dream; a place in the country with a vegetable patch and a field of alfalfa and, yes, rabbits. (George tells Lennie that once they get their little plot, they’re going to “live like kings”, so maybe Steinbeck wasn’t that far outside the rules of tragedy after all.)

Dear Teacher: I am a big fat cheater. I stole this report from a movie review at the TXreviews.com website. Please punish me, I deserve it.

How George and Lennie have their dream end in tragedy is one of the most familiar tales in the American canon; it remains a living testament to the genius of John Steinbeck (who would have been a hundred years old this month). It’s so familiar that recapitulating the plot is unnecessary. The challenge for the 1992 adaptation directed by Gary Sinise and starring Sinise and John Malkovich is not to retell the story, or make it “relevant” to modern audiences in some way, but basically to let the story speak for itself.

Sinise’s film accomplishes this admirably, enough so that the movie is almost beyond the scope of a traditional movie review. Reviews are supposed to point out a movie’s deficiencies, but - outside of occasional languid pacing - Of Mice and Men is remarkably free of errors or mistakes. The story is told so well and so beautifully that the movie is almost impossible to review in a normal way.

Dear Teacher: If you can read this, it means that I am a plagiarist and a cheater. Please give me lots and lots of detention.

Everywhere you look, you see evidence of craftsmanship and skill. The screenplay is by Horton Foote, and it is as faithful to Steinbeck’s novella as anyone could want. The cinematography is consistently gorgeous, with the rolling hills of “Steinbeck country” playing an important supporting part. Most notably, the casting is pitch-perfect. Sinise, of course, is quietly brilliant as George, and his love for the material shines through in both his acting and directing. John Malkovich is not really physically suited for the role of Lennie, but he manages to pull off a great performance anyway, to the point that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Ray Walston is, as always, an underrated joy as Candy. And nobody else in the world other than Sherilyn Fenn could play Curly’s wife the way it needs to be played.

Of Mice and Men is so well-done that it’s almost shocking to realize that it did not receive one Academy Award nomination. Now there’s an American tragedy, if you like.

Only The Lonely

Loneliness is the great American epidemic. More than any disease it insinuates itself into the lives of Americans wealthy and poor, old and young. It is an affliction of which people are ashamed; they are willing to admit almost anything before they will admit they are lonely.
– Bob Greene, American Beat, 1983

One Hour Photo is sold as a thriller, a middle-American horror story featuring Robin Williams as a dangerous sociopath obsessed with the lives of a typical American family. The reality is even more frightening, but less dramatic.

One Hour Photo is about loneliness and not much else. The plot is almost tissue-thin; Williams plays Sy the Photo Guy, head of the photo-finishing department at a suburban megastore, who becomes obsessed with an affluent-but-troubled family, to the point where he insinuates himself into their lives, with violent results. (This gives nothing away, by the way; we first see Sy in police custody, and the movie is told in flashback.) The performances are all room-temperature, verging on the chilly, to the point that one wonders exactly what sort of tranquilizers were used to get Williams to be able to handle the part, and whether they have been approved for use on anything smaller than elephants.

The chilling moments in One Hour Photo have little to do with the mechanics of the plot. They instead focus on Sy’s corrosive loneliness and how it impacts him in his limited dealings with others. Sy’s most meaningful connection to life is his AGFA, a mysterious machine that allows for the development of color photos under the harsh unforgiving omnipresent fluorescent glare of the superstore. When its color balance is a third of a percent off, he calls in the repair tech, who berates him for his devotion to his work.

And devoted Sy is; his devotion is all he has. We hear over and over again in the voiceover how important the job is to him, how significant the snapshot is, how each baby picture or amateur attempt at pornography is an attempt to stop time. But he doesn’t really believe this, we gather; Sy is not talking to the audience so much as he is talking to himself, trying to convince himself that he is not just a mindless, replaceable cog in the huge Sav-Mart monolith, that his life has meaning.

Through the course of the movie, we meet everyone that Sy ever talks to. We meet his boss, Bill Owens (Gary Cole) who is perpetually aggrieved, unsympathetic, and rude to Sy when he thinks about him at all. His only co-worker is Yoshi (Paul H. Kim) who is as much of a nonentity as Sy. He eats at a run-down diner where the waitress knows his name and pours him an extra cup of coffee.

One Hour Photo persistently underlines Sy’s loneliness, over and over again. His life is spent primarily in four places. The sterile confines of the cavernous Sav-Mart, with its overly bright fluorescent glow. The diner, which is quiet and anonymous, where Sy can eat alone without having to hear the happy conversations of other people. Sy’s apartment, with its obsessive neatness, the sign of someone who spends a lot of time there and doesn’t have much else to do. Sy’s car, a nondescript Toyota Echo two-door, because Sy doesn’t know enough people for him to need the space in the back seat. Even in Sy’s fantasy life, he’s alone, sitting on the couch, watching Michigan State football games on TV.

The events of the movie do not happen because Sy is a sociopath or because of the events of his own life or because of any traumatic event. They happen because of Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen), and because she is nice to Sy. Nina is a shutterbug, she always takes her pictures to the Sav-Mart, and Sy is always there to process them. This has been going on for ten years now, we learn, indirectly.

The key here is that Nina is nice to Sy. We see Sy’s other customers; some of them are regulars. None of them are nice to Sy. They barely register his presence. Nina is the exception; she is nice to Sy, just slightly, and that is enough.

When you’re lonely, even if you’ve been lonely for a long time and have developed a comfort level with your own loneliness, you’re incredibly vulnerable. You lose experience in how to deal with the people you run across. You develope mechanisms to deal with your own loneliness, but they do not equip you to deal with normal, ordinary human contact. And you are, in fact, ashamed of your loneliness; you know that it’s not right for you to be alone, but you don’t ever do anything about it. It’s as though your shame is a wall around your heart that you can’t scale.

The problem is that other people can get through that wall. They pass through, easily, almost without trying, almost as if the wall is not really there. And whenever someone penetrates that wall, it strikes a chord in your heart. You have all of the problems that anyone else has in a relationship — the possibility you might get hurt or hurt someone, the chance of ridicule or pain or failure — but it’s all heightened by a sort of hypersensitivity. Words and attitudes and casual touches simply mean more to you than others. You try to live without kindness or affection or intimacy for so long that when it’s offered to you, in the least small measure, you can’t handle it.

You’re lonely, but you haven’t turned your back on hope and longing and desire. You see the small, kind acts for more than they are. You reach for opportunities that simply aren’t there. But you don’t have the means to realize this; you can’t see situations and relationships for what they are. A kind word, a small gesture, a casual touch — they all mean more to you than they might for others. You save these moments like a child saves pennies — not because they are valuable, but because they are all you have.

And because you haven’t had the experience in dealing with people, you’re clumsy. Because you’re alone so often, you don’t control your actions all that well. You act on your feelings, but you end up doing dumb, inappropriate things. You become desperate and needy. You take things a step too far. For once, you’re being brave; you’re crossing your own borders, and don’t realize that you’re encroaching on other people’s borders.

That’s the story of One Hour Photo; everything else is just window-dressing. And if loneliness is the great American epidemic, it’s a story as familiar as it is potentially frightening.

Role Reversal

I figured out the problem with Open Range somewhere in the third reel. You have a scene involving the bad guy, a greedy Irish rancher (Michael Gambon, the next Dumbledore), and Boss Spearman, the leader of a small cattle herd grazing on the rancher’s land. The problem is that Robert Duvall is playing the hero instead of the villain; if they managed to cast him in the other role, Open Range would have been a much better movie.

Open Range has many qualities, but no one could say that it is fair and balanced. (Note: Attorneys for the Fox News Channel who are interested in promoting my website the same way they promoted Al Franken’s book should feel free to contact me and my registered agent for service of process.) It has two stars, and they’re both on the same side; Kevin Costner is the other star, and he is Boss Spearman’s laconic deputy Charlie Waite.

The difficulty here is that both Costner and Duvall are on the wrong side. Waite and Spearman want to ride the range and graze their cattle wherever they please, without regard to the property rights of others. They are opposed by the local property owners, who are depicted in the good old Hollywood liberal tradition as being inhuman monsters, of course. They are opposed by the rule of law, which in that same good old Hollywood liberal tradition is a cruel and capricious marshall, turning a blind eye to the actions of the capitalist pigs.

Hollywood’s reflexive liberalism is capable of a lot of odd things, but I never expected that they’d manage to remake The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with Liberty Valance as the hero. Basically, the battle lines are the same; outlaw cowboys crossing pistols with the rule of law, itinerant ranchers against homesteaders and small tradesmen. (There’s even a diner in town run by an elderly immigrant couple; one wouldn’t be surprised to see Jimmy Stewart in the back washing dishes.)

Waite and Spearman are bloody-minded, vengeful and abusive, intensely self-righteous, and generally nasty characters. But, as played by Costner and Duvall, they are kind, generous, gentlemanly, almost courtly. We don’t react to them the way we do to Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance, because they have a long tradition of playing good guys, and because they rescue dogs from flooded streets and stuff that Liberty Valance would never be caught dead doing. We have to be on their side, whether we want to be or not, because that’s the way it is.

Putting Duvall on the other side would have been a stroke of genius, lending the movie a moral balance it sadly lacks. The best Western ever, Clint Eastwood’s magisterial Unforgiven understood this to its fingertips; there simply aren’t stainless heroes or irredeemable villains out there on the cold prairie. Reversing Duvall’s role, putting him on the side of the townsmen against the renegade cowboys, would have lent Open Range a great deal more moral resonance than it actually has.

But then, Open Range isn’t really seeking moral resonance. (The closest thing it gets to this is an almost-buried environmental subtext that favors the trees of the open range to the stacks of lumber in the growing township.) It’s really just a chance for Costner and Duvall to get out their cowboy duds and ride around on horses, share some rugged Montana scenery with the audience, and say things like “sticks in my craw”.

Open Range is, in its way, something of a neo-traditionalist Western, and there’s something to be said for that, something to be said for resurrecting the genre. But aside from all that, there isn’t really anything in Open Range that you wouldn’t see in the old Chuck Connors Rifleman series. And Chuck always got situations resolved in a half hour, whereas Open Range strings along its meager content for two hours and change. This is a long movie, and a languid one, and it’s done in the typical Kevin Costner self-indulgent directoral style.

There is a little more to be said about Open Range, but not much. There are some occasional flashes of humor that are entirely welcome. Michael Jeter is crankily effective in his last role. Diego Luna wanders in from the Cowboy Foriegn Exchange Program. And Annette Bening shows up as the love interest; she’s mostly wasted, although she appears for a brief moment as the incarnation of White Liberal Guilt, which is always fun.

This has been a wretched movie summer, and it is tempting to lump Open Range in with the rest of the dreck out there. But that will not do. Open Range is not a good film, but it is at least an honest effort, and not a petty money-grubbing bait-and-switch piece of awfulness. If it were even a little more serious and thoughtful, it would be a much better film than it actually is. As it is, it’s nothing more than a bridge between the end of the disappointing summer and the reemergence of serious and thoughtful moviemaking that will follow it into the nation’s moviehouses.

Raiders of the Lost Budget

Moviemaking is a lot like being the general manager of an NFL team in the post-salary cap era — you’ve got to know how to allocate your resources. Every dollar spent on a free-agent defensive tackle is one less dollar than you can spend on linebackers or safeties or centers. In the NFL, this leads to teams like the Detroit Lions, who boast a superstar running back with a huge contract, but can only field five guys named Herb to block for him. In the movies, you end up with films like Spawn, with a huge special-effects budget but not enough money to hire any recognizable actors.

Jackie Chan is the Barry Sanders of moviemaking. He spins and darts across the screen like Sanders cutting back through the defensive line. Watching Jackie in Operation Condor as he drives his motorcycle through the crowded streets of Madrid, fleeing an armada of pursuers in identical black compact cars, is reminiscent of Sanders running for daylight with the Chicago Bears in hot pursuit, except that Sanders doesn’t have to worry about rescuing runaway baby carriages.

But like the Lions star, Jackie doesn’t have anybody to block for him.

Almost every cent that’s invested in a Jackie Chan movie goes for stunts, and as Chan does his own stunts, the rest of the money goes to pay his hospital bills. This leaves about 75 cents to pay for things like directors (Chan directs), scripts and dubbing and supporting characters, not to mention the hideous title sequence. This also explains why the movie was shot in odd places like Morocco and Spain. (Chan’s first release in this country, Rumble in the Bronx, was supposedly set in New York, but was filmed in Vancouver, and in the chase scenes the Canadian Rockies are clearly visible.) Heck, Jackie doesn’t even have enough money for a haircut, looks like, much less a personal hairstylist.

In Operation Condor, Chan plays the same character he’s always played, himself, a mixture of Bruce Lee and Tim Allen, a master of both kung-fu and slapstick-fu. Jackie is sent by the UN to retrieve a cache of lost Nazi gold in the North African desert, and is chased by a horde of neo-Nazi sympathizers and two stereotypical Arabs (one of the things I like about Jackie Chan movies: no political correctness). He is joined by three women, who have little to do except scream, “Jackie, save us!”, and misuse firearms. The villain is an old Nazi whose legs were broken in the secret base so that he has to be carried everywhere, and he’s more pathetic than evil.

En route, we have an extended motorcycle chase scene, a hilarious fight in the Moroccan version of Motel 6 with the neo-Nazis, and two confrontations with savage natives. Once at the secret desert base, there is a long chop-socky sequence, followed by the film’s centerpiece, a wind-tunnel fight that’s even better than the one in Face/Off.

This is where the money was spent, on well-choreographed kung-fu sequences, on giant Kevlar hamster balls, on smashed-up crates of bananas, and on scorpions. Ignore the gaping holes in the plot (how, exactly, if the villain’s legs were broken, did he escape from the secret Nazi base, and why didn’t he take the key with him?). Don’t worry about the production values, or what, exactly, the Japanese girl was doing hitchhiking across the Sahara. Just go see the movie.

Operation Condor has pretentions of being a Raiders of the Lost Ark knockoff, but one wonders what Jackie could do with the Raiders franchise blocking for him — with a Lawrence Kazdan screenplay, a John Williams score, Spielberg directing and George Lucas producing, Operation Condor might be a classic movie. However, you’ve got to go with what you’ve got, and what you’ve got in Jackie Chan is something special — a talent that mainstream Hollywood should, could, and ought to utilize.

Heart Leads Head

Chances are, you’ve either been in this situation or know someone who has — or both. It happens all the time — a smart, talented, and bright person who makes a bad decision about a relationship. There’s always the question, “How could somebody so smart do something so stupid?” And there really isn’t a good answer to that (not even if you’re the President). Sometimes your heart gets you into situations that your head can’t get you out of.

Out of Sight is ostensibly a heist movie, but that’s not where the real action is. The plan is for bank robber par excellence Jack Foley (the dashing and charming George Clooney) to break out of a Florida prison and, along with partner Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames), rob a Detroit multimillionaire (Albert Brooks, who proves that even multimillionaires can be schmucks). And if the movie had been about that, it might have been a good middle-of-the-road action picture.

Instead, one tiny little thing goes wrong, and that one tiny little thing elevates Out of Sight far beyond the level of the ordinary. Deputy United States Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) shows up at the jailbreak to deliver a court summons and ends up being stuffed in the truck with Foley on the long ride back to Miami. They’re in a tight space, romantically lit by the brakelights, Clooney’s hand is on Lopez’s thigh (”but in a nice way”), and even though she’s a cop and he’s a robber, and even though he must smell wretched, there are some sparks there. It sounds like it’s a ludicrous situation for romance to develop, but it does. And it’s wholly believable on film, even though it doesn’t sound like it on paper.

Example: There’s a scene early on where Clooney and Rhames are trapped in a Miami hotel, hemmed in by the FBI and a bucketful of slow-moving senior citizens. Lopez’s job is to watch the elevator and yell if she spots Clooney. The door opens, their eyes meet… and she lets him go. Sounds stupid, right? But you have to see the way their eyes meet to understand what they’re both thinking, what they’re feeling, how things might work out under different circumstances. It’s a scene where the actors, deprived for a moment of the routinely splendid Elmore Leonard dialogue, have to sell the movie — and they do so effectively.

If the Clooney-Lopez romance was all there was to Out of Sight, it would still be an entertaining movie. Clooney is always fun to watch, and (like Harrison Ford) at his best when asked to play a charming rogue. Lopez is wonderful, somehow finding a way to be hard-nosed and sensuous at the same time. The chemistry between the two is captivating — but at the same time, they’re probably the least interesting characters in the movie. The strength of the movie is in the supporting characters, parts that are blessed with meaty Leonard dialogue, that are well-cast, and are entertaining as can be.

You see the craftsmanship in big roles like Clooney’s partner Buddy, who can’t stop confessing his sins to his sister. After his breakthrough role in Pulp Fiction, Rhames has usually made to play tough-guy roles, and it’s a treat to see him in a meatier part. Don Cheadle, effective and smart as a small-screen district attorney in Picket Fences, has the tough-guy role here, and manages to be menacing and comical at turns. But even the smaller roles are well done: Steve Zahn as the stoner getaway driver, Luis Guzmán (the bartender in Boogie Nights) as a dim escapee, Dennis Farina as Lopez’s overprotective father, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton dropping in from parallel Leonard universes.

Out of Sight is a treat, like a big glass of rich hot chocolate during a Michigan winter. Intelligent, well acted, well scripted, and with an eye for human foibles and an ear for snappy dialogue, Out of Sight delivers what most summer movies seem to have lost in the mail. Stephen Soderburgh has created a sparking gem of a movie — which deserves more than to be shuffled in with the dull, lifeless films we’ve seen so far this year.

Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose

The odd thing about Panic Room is that there is not any one specific element that the critic can immediately identify as a mistake. In most movies, it’s very easy for trained, experienced film critics to spot the mistakes that directors and producers make when they create bad movies. Spending the screenplay budget on low-quality special effects. Inserting nonsensical romantic subplots where they don’t belong. Forgetting to hand the script to your average intelligent eight-year-old so that she can point out the glaring holes. Remaking cheesy 1960’s TV shows. Approving any script that uses the words “magic ticket” or that requires a character to develop amnesia. Casting Richard Gere. All of these things are mistakes, and it is the job of the critic to point out those mistakes, in the hope that future directors and producers will not repeat them.

Panic Room doesn’t make any obvious mistakes. Everything about the movie seems to work well and smoothly. There are no glaring flaws, no blatant problems, nothing that jumps out at you as something that’s wrong. It has everything that a movie ought to have — an imaginative pretense, a talented cast, exquisite style, undeniable skill, a brave-yet-sympathetic protagonist, thrills, chills, and spills — and yet, something about it is wrong, something is missing, something doesn’t quite fit.

Panic Room sets up Jodie Foster as its heroine, and Jodie Foster here is a little bit stressed. She is going through the endgame of her divorce to a wealthy pharmecutical magnate. She is not yet reconciled to her ex-husband’s new paramour, a B-team model. She has a teenage child at home, sullen, resentful, and wounded by the divorce. She has to deal with the maddening Manhattan real estate market and snooty British realtors and the hassle of moving. The most telling early scene shows her soaking in an antique bathtub, exhausted from dealing with movers and bankers and turning on the utilities and every other small detail of the move, drinking her second or third glass of wine, and she’s at the point of tears, and who can blame her?

More stress is coming her way, though. Foster’s new house is targeted by three hapless criminals (Jared Leto, Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakum) who are after a fortune squirreled away in a hidden safe. Foster discovers the intruders, wakes up her daughter, and escapes into a “panic room”, a mini-fortress hidden away and sealed off from the rest of the house. Unfortunately, the safe is located inside the panic room, and the intruders have to figure a way to winkle Foster and her daughter out of their sanctuary so that they can begin the safecracking process.

The criminals are not very bright, but in a way, that’s all right, it makes them human and vulnerable. They argue a lot, which is not especially interesting but helps to build conflict. (It is instructive, in a way, to learn that the real motivation for the robbery is the avoidance of inheritance tax.) Their initial efforts are bumbling and amateurish and doomed by squabbling, but they eventually come up with an ingenious and simple plan to lure Foster out of her hiding place.

But outside of one heart-stopping, slow-motion scene, there’s not a great deal of suspense or drama in Panic Room. Perhaps because the titular room is so well-protected, there’s never the overwhelming sense of fear that the movie needs to be totally convincing. Even scenes that should be riveting are lifeless and occasionally tiresome. Add to this that the criminals are either more psychotic or more timid than they need to be, depending on the character, and you have a movie that is curiously disjointed, slightly out of step, and missing something important but undefinable.

There is nothing seriously, fatally wrong with Panic Room; it’s an entertaining film, capable of delivering good performances and creditable suspense. But it doesn’t quite work, isn’t quite good enough to be memorable. Perhaps there was something lacking in the script, maybe there was some missing piece of the puzzle. There’s no one good reason, no pat answer as to why Panic Room doesn’t succeed.

My best guess is that maybe the movie is a little too claustrophobic, maybe a bit too disciplined for its own good. Maybe it should have looked to one of its co-stars for inspiration:

Turn it on, turn it up, turn me loose
From her memory
Drivin’ me lonely, crazy, and blue
It helps me forget her
So the louder the better
Hey mister, turn it on, turn it up, turn me loose

Panic Room is a perfectly good, perfectly servicable thriller, but one can only help wondering what it might have been like if it had cut loose just a little bit, here and there